1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for displaying an electronic document on a digital handheld device, and more specifically to a method for reducing the size of the electronic document to be displayed on the digital handheld device.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Currently, there is a wide variety of digital handheld devices available to consumers. One popular type of digital handheld device is a personal digital assistant (PDA). PDAs are portable and are commonly used to read electronic documents such as web pages. A user can store, manipulate, and access large amounts of information in the form of electronic documents with the aid of a PDA.
A large number of PDA users want to be able to view documents originating from a personal computer (PC) on their PDAs. For example, if a user downloads a web page from the Internet using his PC but wishes to read the web page while commuting, he can simply transfer the web page to his PDA. Then, while commuting, the user can browse the web page at his leisure.
The prior art method for displaying an electronic document on a PDA is illustrated in FIG. 1. Shown in FIG. 1 is a typical PDA 10 comprising a user interface 12 and a screen 14. The screen 14 is made up of a plurality of pixels, and has a width of 240 pixels and height of 320 pixels. Displayed on the screen 14 are a horizontal scroll bar 16, a vertical scroll bar 18, and a portion of an electronic document 20. The electronic document 20 originated from a PC and has a size larger than the size of the PDA screen 14, for example 810 pixels wide by 1974 pixels high, and consequently cannot be displayed in entirety the screen 14. As a result, the PDA screen 20 can only display a portion of the document 20 at a given time.
When a user views the document 20, the user must control the scroll bars 16 and 18 by touching a stylus to the screen 14 to scroll the document to the desired portion. Alternatively, the user can employ the user interface 12 to scroll the document 20. As the document 20 actually requires twenty-eight PDA screens to view entirely, the user may find this to be tiresome. Additionally, viewing a relatively small portion of the whole document 20 may cause difficulty for the user in understanding the document 20.
The prior art method of displaying an electronic document on a handheld device is inconvenient and can lead to misunderstanding of the electronic document.